Mike Davis (scholar)

Mike Davis (born 1946) is an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California. His most recent book is Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener.

Mike Davis
Born1946 (age 73–74)
Fontana, California, United States
Alma materUniversity of California, Los Angeles
School
Main interests
“Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties,” co-authored by Jon Wiener, with Davis’s two earlier books on L.A.

Life

Born in Fontana, California and raised in El Cajon, California, Davis' education was punctuated by stints as a meat cutter, truck driver, and a Congress of Racial Equality and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist. He briefly studied at Reed College in the mid-1960s but did not begin his academic career in earnest until the early 1970s, when he earned BA and MA degrees but did not complete the PhD program in History from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Davis has stated that one of the moments prompting him returning to study after working was a violent strike, "I had this job with a bus-tour company when suddenly this insanely violent strike broke out. A strikebreaker ran a bus over one of our guys, and next thing I knew I was in a room with forty guys voting on whether each of us is gonna put up $400 to hire a hit man to kill the head of the strikebreakers. I said, 'Hey, guys, this is just crazy,' and made the best speech of my life. I was outvoted thirty-nine to one. I thought to myself, 'Typical American workers'; I think I said 'pussies.' Instead of coming up with a political strategy, they reach for their guns as soon as they see a scab driving their bus. And here I am about to become a freshman at UCLA, and I'm going to get arrested for criminal conspiracy." [1]

He was a 1996–1997 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute[2] and received a MacArthur Fellowship Award in 1998.[3] He won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007.

He is married to Mexican-American artist Alessandra Moctezuma and lives in San Diego, CA.

Career

Davis is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor of the New Left Review. Davis has taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and at Stony Brook University before he secured a position at University of California, Irvine's history department. He also contributes to the British monthly Socialist Review, the organ of the British Socialist Workers Party. As a journalist and essayist, Davis has written for, among others, The Nation, Jacobin, and the UK's New Statesman.

He is a self-defined international socialist and "Marxist-Environmentalist".[4] He writes in the tradition of socialists/architects/regionalism advocates such as Lewis Mumford and Garrett Eckbo, whom he cites in Ecology of Fear. His early book, Prisoners of the American Dream, was an important contribution to the Marxist study of U.S. history, political economy, and the state, as well as to the doctrine of revolutionary integrationism, as Davis, like Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman, Richard S. Fraser, James Robertson, as well as French anarchist Daniel Guérin, argued that the struggle of blacks in the U.S. was for equality, that this struggle was an explosive contradiction fundamental to the U.S. bourgeois republic, that only socialism could bring it about, and that its momentum would someday be a powerful contribution to a socialist revolution in the U.S.

Davis is also the author of two fiction books for young adults: Land of The Lost Mammoths and Pirates, Bats and Dragons.

Criticisms and reviews

Reviewers have praised Davis' prose style and his exposés of economic, social, environmental and political injustice. His book Planet of Slums inspired a special issue of Mute magazine on global slums.[5]

In spite of the popular success of Davis' critical studies, they have been criticized. Los Angeles communications professional Jill Stewart labeled Davis a "city-hating socialist" in the New Times Los Angeles. These views were brought to a broader audience in Salon.com.[6]

According to Todd Purdum's unfriendly 1999 piece, Davis "acknowledged fabricating an entire conversation with a local environmentalist, Lewis McAdams, for a cover story he wrote for L.A. Weekly a decade ago (in the late 1980s); he defends it as an early attempt at journalistic scene-setting."[7] However, in his October 2004 Geography article, "That Certain Feeling: Mike Davis, Truth and the City," Kevin Stannard held that this "controversy is explained by Davis's ambiguous balancing of academic research and reportage".[8]

Jon Wiener has defended Davis in The Nation, maintaining that his critics are political opponents exaggerating the significance of small errors.[9]

Some academic leftists have also criticized Davis's focus on modern urban structures. In a review essay on "City of Quartz," geographer Cindi Katz criticized its apocalypticism as masculinist and tied it to the flattening of people's subjectivity as they are made into "characters" more than social actors.[10] Citing Jane Jacobs' attacks upon Lewis Mumford in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, Andy Merrifield (MetroMarxism, Routledge 2002) wrote that Davis' analysis was "harsh" (p. 170). Davis' work, particularly Planet of Slums, has been criticized by Merrifield and urban studies professor Tom Angotti as "anti-urban" and "overly apocalyptic".[11]

These critics charge that Davis fails to focus on activist groups among the poor and working class in solving problems—as advocated by Manuel Castells and Marshall Berman.[12]

As he states in Planet of Slums, however, Davis is not interested in such a "reformist" approach. He argues that most reforms have failed because they treat the symptoms rather than the cause: economic and political inequality. He argued in Ecology of Fear[13] that realistic solutions lie in a radical transformation of the city and of capitalism by the global working-class, as Lewis Mumford and Garrett Eckbo advocated.

Awards and honors
  • 1996–1997: Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute
  • 1998: MacArthur Fellowship
  • 2002: World History Association Book Prize, Late Victorian Holocausts
  • 2007: Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction

Works

Books
Nonfiction
  • Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control, The Ecology of Fear (1992)
  • Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (1986, 1999)
  • City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990, 2006)
  • ¿Quién mató a Los Ángeles? (1994, Spanish only)
  • Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998)
  • Casino Zombies: True Stories From the Neon West (1999, German only)
  • Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (2000)
  • Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001)
  • The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas, edited with Hal Rothman (2002)
  • Dead Cities, And Other Tales (2003)
  • Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, with Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew (2003)
  • Cronache Dall’Impero (2005, Italian only)
  • The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005)
  • Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class (2006)
  • No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, with Justin Akers Chacon (2006)
  • Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007)
  • In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (2007)[14]
  • Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk (2007)
  • Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory (2018) [15]
  • Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener (2020)
Fiction
  • Islands Mysterious: Where Science Rediscovers Wonder – a Trilogy, illustrated by William Simpson
    • 1. Land of the Lost Mammoths (2003)
    • 2. Pirates, Bats, and Dragons (2004)
    • 3. Spider Vector (forthcoming)

Articles and essays
  • "The Democrats after November". New Left Review. New Left Review. II (43). January–February 2007.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "Fear and money in Dubai". New Left Review. New Left Review. II (41): 47–68. September–October 2006.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "Who Is Killing New Orleans?". The Nation. April 10, 2006.
  • "The Winged Killer Flies In". Red Pepper. December 2005.
  • "Twenty-five questions about the murder of New Orleans". TomDispatch.com. September 27, 2005.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "Monster at our door". TomDispatch.com. August 16, 2005.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "A paradise built on oil". TomDispatch.com. July 14, 2005.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "Vigilante man". TomDispatch.com. May 6, 2005.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "Political sidelining of Blacks". TomDispatch.com. September 23, 2004.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "Remembering Bill and Ivan". Z Magazine. June 7, 2004.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "Planet of slums". New Left Review. New Left Review. II (26). March–April 2004.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "Believer Interview". The Believer. February 2004.
  • "The great Californian fire". TomDispatch.com. October 27, 2003.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "The Californian recall". TomDispatch.com. September 3, 2003.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "The flames of New York". New Left Review. New Left Review. II (12). November–December 2001.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • "Urban renaissance and the spirit of postmodernism". New Left Review. New Left Review. I (151): 106–113. May–June 1985.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Davis, Mike (May–June 1985). "Urban renaissance and the spirit of postmodernism". New Left Review. New Left Review. I (151): 106–113.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
Review of the essay The Cultural Logic of Late Capital by Frederic Jameson.
gollark: I should see what happens if I do rotate it by 12 degrees 2928463638283 times.
gollark: I wonder if the frequent non-90deg rotations will degrade the image somehow.
gollark: At some point, yes.
gollark: Not now. I'm on my phone.
gollark: GTech™ is extracting 23PW at present, yes.

References
Notes
  1. Adam Shatz. The American Earthquake. Retrieved March 23, 2015.
  2. Getty Research Institute. Scholar Year 1996/1997. Retrieved September 3, 2008.
  3. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. MacArthur Fellows July 1998. Archived September 27, 2011, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved September 3, 2008.
  4. Book review Archived December 1, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, Journal of World History, Vol. 14 No. 3, December 2003 (accessed 2008-05-29)
  5. Mute Archived December 20, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, Co. 2 No.3, August 2006 (accessed 2008-05-29)
  6. "Is Mike Davis' Los Angeles all in his head?", salon.com Website (accessed 2008-05-29)
  7. Todd S. Purdum: "Best-Selling Author's Gloomy Future for Los Angeles Meets Resistance", New York Times, January 27, 1999. (accessed 2008-05-29)
  8. Kevin Stannard, "That Certain Feeling: Mike Davis, Truth and the City", Geography, October 2004. (accessed 2008-05-29)
  9. Jon Wiener: "LA Story: Backlash of the Boosters", The Nation, February 22, 1999. (accessed 2019-06-04)
  10. Cindi Katz: "Reflections While Reading City of Quartz by Mike Davis," Antipode 25:2, 1993, pp. 159-163.
  11. Review of Mike Davis' Planet of Slums Archived October 5, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, The Struggle for the City, June 2008
  12. Merrifield, MetroMarxism, and Tom Angotti, "Apocalyptic Anti-Urbanism: Mike Davis and his Planet of Slums", International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume December 30, 4, 2006, pp.961–7. (accessed 2008-05-29)
  13. Davis, Mike. 2000. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage.
  14. de Leon, Cedric (2008). "Review of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire". Contemporary Sociology. 37 (4): 370–372. ISSN 0094-3061. JSTOR 20444240.
  15. "Verso". www.versobooks.com. Retrieved August 24, 2018.
Bibliography
Reviews
Interviews
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